Tag 85 F-150

Howdy folks, Ed here. Welcome back to Bullnose Garage. Do you like the look of white letters on tires? Well, too bad because you just can’t get them like this anymore, which means that if you want white letters like this on tires like this, you have to do it yourself with stuff like this.

Painting the letters on your tires white is pretty simple, but it does take some time and some supplies. So what I’ll do is I’ll go through the supplies that I used and how I used them to get the result that I got.

So you want to start out definitely with some good cleaner. Now this is that way is totally awesome. I got it from Dollar General for just a couple of bucks, but you could use any cleaner, degreaser, Mean Green, Simple Green, anything like that to clean around and inside these letters really, really well. You need to make sure that all the tire oil and any road oil, if they’re older tires, brake dust, that kind of stuff gets off the tire so the paint sticks real easy.

To do that, you can use a simple household sponge. Make sure it’s something you don’t care about because it’s gonna get disgusting and you’re gonna throw it away when you’re done. And then I also used just a simple rag and a small screwdriver to wrap around like this and help me get inside some of these tiny little nooks and crannies in there.

Once you’ve got it good and clean and dry and ready for paint, then you’re going to want to use an oil-based white or whatever color you want to do, but I use white, an oil-based paint pen, and this is from Sharpie. You can get these at any big box store or any art store. I got a couple of different sizes because I have wide areas and thin areas, so I found that the really wide tip worked good for the wide areas and the outline, and the thin Sharpie worked really good for inside the thinner areas.

You’re also going to want to have on hand some isopropyl alcohol, probably some Q-tips, and then this screwdriver and rag doubles also for cleanup. In case you get white somewhere you don’t want, you can put some isopropyl alcohol on a rag or a Q-tip and it’ll wipe right up, so no problem there.

Now it’s gonna take probably two, at least probably three coats of this Sharpie paint pen to get a result that you’re going to be happy with. And you can stop there, and if you want to drive the vehicle pretty much right away within 24 hours, then that’s where you’re going to want to stop. Me, I decided that I wanted to go one step further and hopefully make the job last a little bit longer and pop just a little bit more. So what I did was I went out and I bought some titanium white oil-based paint from an art store, and I went out and got this brush set, and I did one final top coat over each and every letter on all four tires using this.

One thing to note is that oil-based paint from an art store will take forever to dry. If you’re going to buy oil-based paint, make sure you get some that’s got linseed oil base because linseed oil dries one of the fastest of any of the oil-based art paints. But here we are, I’m going on two weeks that these tires have been sitting here like this after the top coat, and I can still run my finger across the top and bring up just a little bit of white paint. So it’s not a big deal for me. The truck is going to be sitting for a while. I’m doing some brake work on it, so it’s not going to be leaving the garage for probably another two weeks at least. I’m not going to be driving on it a whole lot, so it’s going to have plenty of time to dry. But if it’s a vehicle that you’re going to be driving pretty quickly or you can’t afford to have sitting around for a while, then this last step probably isn’t for you. Like I said, I did it just to get that little bit extra pop and maybe a little bit extra durability, but we’ll see how that goes.

All right, so obviously I’m already done. I’ve got it taken care of, but we’re gonna go to past Ed, who’s gonna show you how I did it. Take it away, past Ed.

The first thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to jack up the back of the truck so that I can spin this tire freely and make it a little bit easier on me without having to get all the way down to the floor. And then we’ll hit this with the cleaner degreaser and use my sponge and give it a really thorough cleaning. You probably already know this, but whenever you jack up a vehicle like this, you always want to use jack stands under the axles rather than just relying on the jack itself. It’s just safer that way.

There we go. Now we can spin the tires. Just so you know, I’ve also chalked the truck in the front to make sure it doesn’t roll on me while it’s up. I’m not too worried about it, but it’s always better safe than sorry. So let’s get to cleaning. Obviously, the part that I’m worried about the most is inside the letters and those little grooves of tiny parts there. And as you can see, even straight from the tire store, it’s pretty gross, so cleaning is really important. I mean, look at that sponge. That’s just this part right here. It looks like I’m probably going to be using three sizes: fine point for getting inside these little ridges, medium point for some of the touch-up stuff in the larger areas, and then this bold point fits right inside these great big fat areas and was probably what I’ll also use to go around the top just to make these white letters here stand out a little bit more.

First thing you’ve got to do is get all these opened up, and of course, there’s no paint in the tips yet, so you’ve got to have something to push this against to get the paint out. And I’ve found that having a flat surface to do that with that you can paint down on and get some gravity flowing really helps a lot.

So, so, so, two weeks later, them white letters must give me at least 20 horsepower. You do have a couple other options besides just painting your tires like that. You could go out and get tire stickers. There’s a couple of companies that make those. They’re just rubber stickers that go right over top of the tire, and they can say whatever you want. You can also try to find tires that already have white lettering like that, but they’re pretty few and far between.

So what I chose to do was go ahead and paint them. After taking the truck out and about and bringing it back, I noticed that a lot of the paint, especially my top coat, is already starting to flake off, and I think that’s due to the tire compression. So when the truck is riding on the ground, obviously the tire compresses a little bit, and as it rolls, the bottom that touches the ground compresses and squishes a little bit. And I think that probably pops some of that paint off.

So when I painted these, the truck was up off the ground so I could spin the tire more easily to get to all the letters, and I think that’s probably what’s going on. If you look at it, you can’t really tell looking at it from this distance, so I’m kind of okay with that. We’re gonna see how long this lasts. Someday I may go ahead and get the tire stickers to put on it. If I like this look, I may decide that I don’t like it. You know, we’ll find out. But if I don’t like it, I can always take it back to the tire store and have them flip the tires around and put the black walls out and then do whatever I want. If I want the tire stickers on there, I can put tire stickers, so I don’t have to. So I got a lot of options. I don’t feel like I wasted my time. I learned a lot, and I do think it looks really nice. I’m really happy with how it turned out. We’re just gonna have to wait and see how long it lasts.

So, there you go. You have any questions, comments, concerns, gripes, internet ramblings, stick them below. Thanks again for watching, guys, and we’ll see you next time.